Why Employment & Support Allowance (and DWP) fails the fitness test

So we’ve reached that annual day on DWP’s media calendar when it pumps out misleading statistics regarding the numbers found ‘fit for work’ following the Work Capability Assessment (1 million since 2008 allegedly).

I’ll leave the critique of the statistics to others, for whatever their accuracy within the internal logic of the absurd system created by the DWP, they are meaningless as an indicator of actual employment prospects.

In the BBC article, Minister for Disabled People Mike Penning MP is quoted as saying ‘it is only fair that we look at whether people can do some kind of work with the right support – rather than just writing them off on long-term sickness benefits, as has happened in the past.’

I couldn’t agree more. Yet that is not what the Work Capability Assessment does at all. It is an abstract measure of functional capacity, not a ‘real world’…